OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Using Virtual Reality to Shape Humanity's Return to the Moon: Key Takeaways from a Design Study
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2023
Year: 2023

Revived interest in lunar exploration is heralding a new generation of design solutions in support of human operations on the Moon. While space system design has traditionally been guided by prototype deployments in analogue studies, the resource-intensive nature of this approach has largely precluded application of proficient user-centered design (UCD) methods from human-computer interaction (HCI). This paper explores possible use of Virtual Reality (VR) to simulate analogue studies in lab settings and thereby bring to bear UCD in this otherwise engineering-dominated field. Drawing on the ongoing development of the European Large Logistics Lander, we have recreated a prospective lunar operational scenario in VR and evaluated it with a group of astronauts and space experts (n=20). Our qualitative findings demonstrate the efficacy of VR in facilitating UCD, enabling efficient contextual inquiries and improving project team coordination. We conclude by proposing future directions to further exploit VR in lunar systems design.
On the Importance of Feature Representation for Flood Mapping using Classical Machine Learning Approaches
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Climate change has increased the severity and frequency of weather disasters all around the world. Flood inundation mapping based on earth observation data can help in this context, by providing cheap and accurate maps depicting the area affected by a flood event to emergency-relief units in near-real-time. Building upon the recent development of the Sen1Floods11 dataset, which provides a limited amount of hand-labeled high-quality training data, this paper evaluates the potential of five traditional machine learning approaches such as gradient boosted decision trees, support vector machines or quadratic discriminant analysis. By performing a grid-search-based hyperparameter optimization on 23 feature spaces we can show that all considered classifiers are capable of outperforming the current state-of-the-art neural network-based approaches in terms of total IoU on their best-performing feature spaces. With total and mean IoU values of 0.8751 and 0.7031 compared to 0.70 and 0.5873 as the previous best-reported results, we show that a simple gradient boosting classifier can significantly improve over deep neural network based approaches, despite using less training data. Furthermore, an analysis of the regional distribution of the Sen1Floods11 dataset reveals a problem of spatial imbalance. We show that traditional machine learning models can learn this bias and argue that modified metric evaluations are required to counter artifacts due to spatial imbalance. Lastly, a qualitative analysis shows that this pixel-wise classifier provides highly-precise surface water classifications indicating that a good choice of a feature space and pixel-wise classification can generate high-quality flood maps using optical and SAR data. We make our code publicly available at: https://github.com/DFKI-Earth-And-Space-Applications/Flood_Mapping_Feature_Space_Importance
Nearest Neighbors Meet Deep Neural Networks for Point Cloud Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Performances on standard 3D point cloud benchmarks have plateaued, resulting in oversized models and complex network design to make a fractional improvement. We present an alternative to enhance existing deep neural networks without any redesigning or extra parameters, termed as Spatial-Neighbor Adapter (SN-Adapter). Building on any trained 3D network, we utilize its learned encoding capability to extract features of the training dataset and summarize them as prototypical spatial knowledge. For a test point cloud, the SN-Adapter retrieves k nearest neighbors (k-NN) from the pre-constructed spatial prototypes and linearly interpolates the k-NN prediction with that of the original 3D network. By providing complementary characteristics, the proposed SN-Adapter serves as a plug-and-play module to economically improve performance in a non-parametric manner. More importantly, our SN-Adapter can be effectively generalized to various 3D tasks, including shape classification, part segmentation, and 3D object detection, demonstrating its superiority and robustness. We hope our approach could show a new perspective for point cloud analysis and facilitate future research.
What Are the Chances? Explaining the Epsilon Parameter in Differential Privacy
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

Differential privacy (DP) is a mathematical privacy notion increasingly deployed across government and industry. With DP, privacy protections are probabilistic: they are bounded by the privacy budget parameter, $ε$. Prior work in health and computational science finds that people struggle to reason about probabilistic risks. Yet, communicating the implications of $ε$ to people contributing their data is vital to avoiding privacy theater -- presenting meaningless privacy protection as meaningful -- and empowering more informed data-sharing decisions. Drawing on best practices in risk communication and usability, we develop three methods to convey probabilistic DP guarantees to end users: two that communicate odds and one offering concrete examples of DP outputs. We quantitatively evaluate these explanation methods in a vignette survey study ($n=963$) via three metrics: objective risk comprehension, subjective privacy understanding of DP guarantees, and self-efficacy. We find that odds-based explanation methods are more effective than (1) output-based methods and (2) state-of-the-art approaches that gloss over information about $ε$. Further, when offered information about $ε$, respondents are more willing to share their data than when presented with a state-of-the-art DP explanation; this willingness to share is sensitive to $ε$ values: as privacy protections weaken, respondents are less likely to share data.
Soft Prompt Guided Joint Learning for Cross-Domain Sentiment Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Aspect term extraction is a fundamental task in fine-grained sentiment analysis, which aims at detecting customer's opinion targets from reviews on product or service. The traditional supervised models can achieve promising results with annotated datasets, however, the performance dramatically decreases when they are applied to the task of cross-domain aspect term extraction. Existing cross-domain transfer learning methods either directly inject linguistic features into Language models, making it difficult to transfer linguistic knowledge to target domain, or rely on the fixed predefined prompts, which is time-consuming to construct the prompts over all potential aspect term spans. To resolve the limitations, we propose a soft prompt-based joint learning method for cross domain aspect term extraction in this paper. Specifically, by incorporating external linguistic features, the proposed method learn domain-invariant representations between source and target domains via multiple objectives, which bridges the gap between domains with varied distributions of aspect terms. Further, the proposed method interpolates a set of transferable soft prompts consisted of multiple learnable vectors that are beneficial to detect aspect terms in target domain. Extensive experiments are conducted on the benchmark datasets and the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method for cross-domain aspect terms extraction.
Improving Model's Focus Improves Performance of Deep Learning-Based Synthetic Face Detectors
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Deep learning-based models generalize better to unknown data samples after being guided "where to look" by incorporating human perception into training strategies. We made an observation that the entropy of the model's salience trained in that way is lower when compared to salience entropy computed for models training without human perceptual intelligence. Thus the question: does further increase of model's focus, by lowering the entropy of model's class activation map, help in further increasing the performance? In this paper we propose and evaluate several entropy-based new loss function components controlling the model's focus, covering the full range of the level of such control, from none to its "aggressive" minimization. We show, using a problem of synthetic face detection, that improving the model's focus, through lowering entropy, leads to models that perform better in an open-set scenario, in which the test samples are synthesized by unknown generative models. We also show that optimal performance is obtained when the model's loss function blends three aspects: regular classification, low-entropy of the model's focus, and human-guided saliency.
A prototype hybrid prediction market for estimating replicability of published work
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2023
Year: 2023

We present a prototype hybrid prediction market and demonstrate the avenue it represents for meaningful human-AI collaboration. We build on prior work proposing artificial prediction markets as a novel machine-learning algorithm. In an artificial prediction market, trained AI agents buy and sell outcomes of future events. Classification decisions can be framed as outcomes of future events, and accordingly, the price of an asset corresponding to a given classification outcome can be taken as a proxy for the confidence of the system in that decision. By embedding human participants in these markets alongside bot traders, we can bring together insights from both. In this paper, we detail pilot studies with prototype hybrid markets for the prediction of replication study outcomes. We highlight challenges and opportunities, share insights from semi-structured interviews with hybrid market participants, and outline a vision for ongoing and future work.
Building Dynamic Ontological Models for Place using Social Media Data from Twitter and Sina Weibo
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2023
Year: 2023

Place holds human thoughts and experiences. Space is defined with geometric measurement and coordinate systems. Social media served as the connection between place and space. In this study, we use social media data (Twitter, Weibo) to build a dynamic ontological model in two separate areas: Beijing, China and San Diego, the U.S.A. Three spatial analytics methods are utilized to generate the place name ontology: 1) Kernel Density Estimation (KDE); 2) Dynamic Method Density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise (DBSCAN); 3) hierarchal clustering. We identified feature types of place name ontologies from geotagged social media data and classified them by comparing their default search radius of KDE of geo-tagged points. By tracing the seasonal changes of highly dynamic non-administrative places, seasonal variation patterns were observed, which illustrates the dynamic changes in place ontology caused by the change in human activities and conversation over time and space. We also investigate the semantic meaning of each place name by examining Pointwise Mutual Information (PMI) scores and word clouds. The major contribution of this research is to link and analyze the associations between place, space, and their attributes in the field of geography. Researchers can use crowd-sourced data to study the ontology of places rather than relying on traditional gazetteers. The dynamic ontology in this research can provide bright insight into urban planning and re-zoning and other related industries.
MoSS: Monocular Shape Sensing for Continuum Robots
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

Continuum robots are promising candidates for interactive tasks in medical and industrial applications due to their unique shape, compliance, and miniaturization capability. Accurate and real-time shape sensing is essential for such tasks yet remains a challenge. Embedded shape sensing has high hardware complexity and cost, while vision-based methods require stereo setup and struggle to achieve real-time performance. This paper proposes the first eye-to-hand monocular approach to continuum robot shape sensing. Utilizing a deep encoder-decoder network, our method, MoSSNet, eliminates the computation cost of stereo matching and reduces requirements on sensing hardware. In particular, MoSSNet comprises an encoder and three parallel decoders to uncover spatial, length, and contour information from a single RGB image, and then obtains the 3D shape through curve fitting. A two-segment tendon-driven continuum robot is used for data collection and testing, demonstrating accurate (mean shape error of 0.91 mm, or 0.36% of robot length) and real-time (70 fps) shape sensing on real-world data. Additionally, the method is optimized end-to-end and does not require fiducial markers, manual segmentation, or camera calibration. Code and datasets will be made available at https://github.com/ContinuumRoboticsLab/MoSSNet.
Active Reward Learning from Multiple Teachers
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Reward learning algorithms utilize human feedback to infer a reward function, which is then used to train an AI system. This human feedback is often a preference comparison, in which the human teacher compares several samples of AI behavior and chooses which they believe best accomplishes the objective. While reward learning typically assumes that all feedback comes from a single teacher, in practice these systems often query multiple teachers to gather sufficient training data. In this paper, we investigate this disparity, and find that algorithmic evaluation of these different sources of feedback facilitates more accurate and efficient reward learning. We formally analyze the value of information (VOI) when reward learning from teachers with varying levels of rationality, and define and evaluate an algorithm that utilizes this VOI to actively select teachers to query for feedback. Surprisingly, we find that it is often more informative to query comparatively irrational teachers. By formalizing this problem and deriving an analytical solution, we hope to facilitate improvement in reward learning approaches to aligning AI behavior with human values.
Stochastic Clustered Federated Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Federated learning is a distributed learning framework that takes full advantage of private data samples kept on edge devices. In real-world federated learning systems, these data samples are often decentralized and Non-Independently Identically Distributed (Non-IID), causing divergence and performance degradation in the federated learning process. As a new solution, clustered federated learning groups federated clients with similar data distributions to impair the Non-IID effects and train a better model for every cluster. This paper proposes StoCFL, a novel clustered federated learning approach for generic Non-IID issues. In detail, StoCFL implements a flexible CFL framework that supports an arbitrary proportion of client participation and newly joined clients for a varying FL system, while maintaining a great improvement in model performance. The intensive experiments are conducted by using four basic Non-IID settings and a real-world dataset. The results show that StoCFL could obtain promising cluster results even when the number of clusters is unknown. Based on the client clustering results, models trained with StoCFL outperform baseline approaches in a variety of contexts.
Interactive Text Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Users interact with text, image, code, or other editors on a daily basis. However, machine learning models are rarely trained in the settings that reflect the interactivity between users and their editor. This is understandable as training AI models with real users is not only slow and costly, but what these models learn may be specific to user interface design choices. Unfortunately, this means most of the research on text, code, and image generation has focused on non-interactive settings, whereby the model is expected to get everything right without accounting for any input from a user who may be willing to help. We introduce a new Interactive Text Generation task that allows training generation models interactively without the costs of involving real users, by using user simulators that provide edits that guide the model towards a given target text. We train our interactive models using Imitation Learning, and our experiments against competitive non-interactive generation models show that models trained interactively are superior to their non-interactive counterparts, even when all models are given the same budget of user inputs or edits.
Parameter Sharing with Network Pruning for Scalable Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.MA 2023
Year: 2023

Handling the problem of scalability is one of the essential issues for multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) algorithms to be applied to real-world problems typically involving massively many agents. For this, parameter sharing across multiple agents has widely been used since it reduces the training time by decreasing the number of parameters and increasing the sample efficiency. However, using the same parameters across agents limits the representational capacity of the joint policy and consequently, the performance can be degraded in multi-agent tasks that require different behaviors for different agents. In this paper, we propose a simple method that adopts structured pruning for a deep neural network to increase the representational capacity of the joint policy without introducing additional parameters. We evaluate the proposed method on several benchmark tasks, and numerical results show that the proposed method significantly outperforms other parameter-sharing methods.
Helpful, Misleading or Confusing: How Humans Perceive Fundamental Building Blocks of Artificial Intelligence Explanations
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2023
Year: 2023

Explainable artificial intelligence techniques are developed at breakneck speed, but suitable evaluation approaches lag behind. With explainers becoming increasingly complex and a lack of consensus on how to assess their utility, it is challenging to judge the benefit and effectiveness of different explanations. To address this gap, we take a step back from sophisticated predictive algorithms and instead look into explainability of simple decision-making models. In this setting, we aim to assess how people perceive comprehensibility of their different representations such as mathematical formulation, graphical representation and textual summarisation (of varying complexity and scope). This allows us to capture how diverse stakeholders -- engineers, researchers, consumers, regulators and the like -- judge intelligibility of fundamental concepts that more elaborate artificial intelligence explanations are built from. This position paper charts our approach to establishing appropriate evaluation methodology as well as a conceptual and practical framework to facilitate setting up and executing relevant user studies.
Spatial Layout Consistency for 3D Semantic Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Due to the aged nature of much of the utility network infrastructure, developing a robust and trustworthy computer vision system capable of inspecting it with minimal human intervention has attracted considerable research attention. The airborne laser terrain mapping (ALTM) system quickly becomes the central data collection system among the numerous available sensors. Its ability to penetrate foliage with high-powered energy provides wide coverage and achieves survey-grade ranging accuracy. However, the post-data acquisition process for classifying the ALTM's dense and irregular point clouds is a critical bottleneck that must be addressed to improve efficiency and accuracy. We introduce a novel deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) technique for achieving voxel-based semantic segmentation of the ALTM's point clouds. The suggested deep learning method, Semantic Utility Network (SUNet) is a multi-dimensional and multi-resolution network. SUNet combines two networks: one classifies point clouds at multi-resolution with object categories in three dimensions and another predicts two-dimensional regional labels distinguishing corridor regions from non-corridors. A significant innovation of the SUNet is that it imposes spatial layout consistency on the outcomes of voxel-based and regional segmentation results. The proposed multi-dimensional DCNN combines hierarchical context for spatial layout embedding with a coarse-to-fine strategy. We conducted a comprehensive ablation study to test SUNet's performance using 67 km x 67 km of utility corridor data at a density of 5pp/m2. Our experiments demonstrated that SUNet's spatial layout consistency and a multi-resolution feature aggregation could significantly improve performance, outperforming the SOTA baseline network and achieving a good F1 score for pylon 89%, ground 99%, vegetation 99% and powerline 98% classes.
Open Problem: Optimal Best Arm Identification with Fixed Budget
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Best arm identification or pure exploration problems have received much attention in the COLT community since Bubeck et al. (2009) and Audibert et al. (2010). For any bandit instance with a unique best arm, its asymptotic complexity in the so-called fixed-confidence setting has been completely characterized in Garivier and Kaufmann (2016) and Chernoff (1959), while little is known about the asymptotic complexity in its "dual" setting called fixed-budget setting. This note discusses the open problems and conjectures about the instance-dependent asymptotic complexity in the fixed-budget setting.
Practical Network Acceleration with Tiny Sets: Hypothesis, Theory, and Algorithm
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Due to data privacy issues, accelerating networks with tiny training sets has become a critical need in practice. Previous methods achieved promising results empirically by filter-level pruning. In this paper, we both study this problem theoretically and propose an effective algorithm aligning well with our theoretical results. First, we propose the finetune convexity hypothesis to explain why recent few-shot compression algorithms do not suffer from overfitting problems. Based on it, a theory is further established to explain these methods for the first time. Compared to naively finetuning a pruned network, feature mimicking is proved to achieve a lower variance of parameters and hence enjoys easier optimization. With our theoretical conclusions, we claim dropping blocks is a fundamentally superior few-shot compression scheme in terms of more convex optimization and a higher acceleration ratio. To choose which blocks to drop, we propose a new metric, recoverability, to effectively measure the difficulty of recovering the compressed network. Finally, we propose an algorithm named PRACTISE to accelerate networks using only tiny training sets. PRACTISE outperforms previous methods by a significant margin. For 22% latency reduction, it surpasses previous methods by on average 7 percentage points on ImageNet-1k. It also works well under data-free or out-of-domain data settings. Our code is at https://github.com/DoctorKey/Practise